Brewing Equipment Starter Kit + Beer Kit

Brewing Equipment Starter Kit + Beer Kit

This Premium quality starter Brewing Equipment kit contains all the re-useable equipment to allow you to start brewing beer, lager or cider together with a Coopers Real Ale. Alternative beer kits can be added if preferred**

£35.99

a Beer Kit for this starter kit:

Quantity: at £35.99 each

2 in stock.

Brewing beer at home is easy and this Premium starter kit makes it even easier by providing everything you need, except water (and sugar, where needed), to start brewing 40 pints of bitter, lager or cider. A standard Coopers Real Ale kit is included, but you can also choose one of our premium kits and the price will automatically be adjusted. If you would like a kit that isn't listed here, please contact us prior to ordering and we will add it to the available options.

Contents:

25 ltr Brewing Bin and Lid

Hydrometer - for checking the progress of fermentation

Thermometer - for checking the temperature prior to adding the yeast

Syphon Tube - for transferring beer to bottles* or pressure barrel*

Sterilising Solution - to clean and sterilise all equipment

Slottted Brewing Paddle or Brewing Spoon

Beer Yeast Sachet

40 pint Coopers Real Ale Kit**

Full Instructions

In order to keep their costs down, many brewing starter kits do not include a thermometer and often have a cheap, poor quality hydrometer and a basic syphon tube with no tap or rigid tube. Our starter kits all include a quality, Stevenson-Reeves hydrometer, a 10" glass thermometer and a complete syphon system (including a tap and sediment trap) to make it easy for you to transfer your beer into your bottles or barrel.

Whilst not essential, you may find it useful to add some or all of the following to your kit to make the brewing process a little easier:

Many of the “how to” books and online forums insist that all fermentation should be undertaken under an airlock, but fail to specify which TYPE of fermentation vessel they are using.

If you are using a 5 gallon carboy (as favoured by many American brewers) which is effectively a very large glass demijohn, or one of the 5 gallon plastic wine fermenters, then yes, you need an airlock as carboys and fermenters tend to be straight sided and have “shoulders” that funnel the CO2 towards the large opening at the top through which gas can escape and “nasties” can get in. This hole can not be completely sealed otherwise you would effectively end up with a pressure vessel and the gas produced during the early part of the fermentation process would potentially become quite dangerous. As a result, an airlock is fitted to allow the excess CO2 produced to escape before it reaches dangerous pressure levels. As a side consequence, you can also see from the bubbling of the airlock that fermentation is progressing and can gauge how near the process is to finishing.

UK standard brewing bins tend to be more or less conical in shape, with the top being wider than the bottom and have “snap shut” lids. Whilst these lids are suitable for keeping bugs out, they are not air tight and thus automatically self–release any excess pressure created during fermentation. In addition, the sloping shape of the bins tend to dissipate the CO2 rather than funnel it towards an airlock in the same way that a carboy or wine fermenter would do. This means that you can not reliably use an airlock to gauge the progression of the fermentation and it is easy to assume that the primary ferment has finished as soon as bubbles are no longer visibly passing through the airlock. This can lead to too much unfermented sugar being transferred into the bottles or barrels being used for storage and can lead to excessive pressures being produced during the “conditioning” phase of the brewing process.

After 25+ years of brewing without an airlock, I work on the basis that unless the lid has a hole in it, you don’t need to fill it and therefore don’t put airlocks with any of our beer, lager or cider starter kits as the standard Youngs or Ritchies 25ltr Fermenting bins that we supply with our starter kits do not have holes in their lids.

*You will need either beer bottles or a 5 gallon pressure barrel or to store and dispense your beer - these are not supplied as part of this starter kit but a selection of barrels and bottles is available in the "Equipment" section of this site and are shown below.

**The kit is supplied with a Coopers Real Ale 1.5kg beer kit as standard, but you can easily substitute this for a Coopers Lager kit at no extra cost. If you would prefer to try a different beer kit from our range, please select one from the options below and we will adjust the price accordingly. The single can Coopers kits will need 1kg of Granulated Sugar, Brewing Sugar or Beer Enhancer to provide the full complement of fermentable material. If you have upgraded to a "Two Can Kit", you will not need any additional material other than the priming sugar.